Manage Search Service Application: Access Denied. Sharepoint 2010

Question

When I click Manage on the Search Service application I get the access denied page.

ULS gives me nothing but:

"Unknown SPRequest error occurred. More information: 0x80070005"

We have upgraded through Search Foundation to Search Server Express to Search Server.

Our main web app is claims based authentication whereas our Central Administration is NTLM.

I found the following post which seems to be the same issue but there doesn't appear to be a solution.

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepoint2010setup/thread/2deafa72-6e91-4c43-aed3-895b24d504ac

Any advice on hunting down permissions issues of this type would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The Service Applications run outside of the main Web Application. Make sure that you are accessing the application with the right account, from the Service Application page check that the Search Service Application has the right database configuration and accounts and that those accounts have the right permissions. If you are accessing the Search Service Application (SSA) with the Admin account and still getting permission errors I'd suggest removing the SSA and rebuilding it with the right permissions and accounts, make sure the Search databases are removed if you intent to reuse the names. I've seen instances where the Search Service gets corrupted by the databases and unless they are removed you get continual errors, but since the Search DB's only contain crawl results you can get the crawl back. Oh, if you have indexing turned on, make sure you remove the indexes as well before rebuilding the service.

Answer 2

It could be a simple case as the account you're using doesn't have permissions to administer the service application. From the "Manage Service Applications" page in CA, select the service application, then click the "Permissions" icon on the ribbon and ensure the user has access to the service application. If you're trying to manage the service application, you'll likely have to add the user to the Administrators list as well. In many scenarios, your account will need have to permissions, and be an administrator.

If you don't see the Permissions button, then that can be your first clue that you don't have the right level of access, in which case you'll need to login as the installation account and use that account to grant access to the other account.

Answer 3

I did end up solving this myself. The issue was a set of quick links on the Search service application front page. By logging in with the farm account and closing the links webpart I fixed the issue.